


The Passersby (I'll Be Seeing You)

by trailingviolets



Category: Captain America (Comics), Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, The Twilight Zone, Twilight Zone
Genre: A remix of the Twilight Zone, Hurt Bucky Barnes, Jewish Bucky Barnes, M/M, Post-Serum Steve Rogers, Post-War, Rod Serling is the hero we never deserved, World War II, a lot of script read went into this sucker
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-03
Updated: 2016-04-03
Packaged: 2018-05-30 23:00:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6445711
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trailingviolets/pseuds/trailingviolets
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A fog-faded road with a middle-distance cast in shadow. A dingy operating table belonging to German science. A rattling fighter jet plunged into ice. This is the brief, circumstantial evidence of a story played out on the stage of time-immemorial grief. Tonight we rehash the events of humanity's darkest nightmare.</p><p>A Twilight Zone remix of The First Avenger.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Passersby (I'll Be Seeing You)

**Author's Note:**

> This is a script remix of the Twilight Zone episode "The Passersby", which was originally about the aftermath of the Civil War. It's on Netflix if you didn't catch it during the New Year's marathon.
> 
> The folk song from the script is replaced by the ever-popular wartime classic "I'll Be Seeing You". 
> 
> The dialogue is almost entirely lifted from the original work. It's a testament to Serling that the material holds up so well under scrutiny. 
> 
> The Twilight Zone originated and defined a whole new sub-genre of screenwriting, which led eventually to Black Mirror and other sci fi hits that are popular today.

A fog-faded road with a middle-distance cast in shadow. A dingy operating table belonging to German science. A rattling fighter jet plunged into arctic ice. 

This is the brief, circumstantial evidence of a story played out on the stage of time-immemorial grief.

Tonight we rehash the events of humanity's darkest nightmare from a perspective only found in... _The Twilight Zone_.

~~~

At first it came as no surprise: hoards and hoards, among them the amputated, the scrawny, the neglected and starved. Prisoners and refugees, Americans and Germans, Commanders and Privates. 

Disillusioned men with a inkling in their eyes that spoke of the sole desire to trudge on. Men for whom the offer of speech was a meaningless enterprise.

Cherishing no other hope for fulfillment but the fog at the end of the road.

~~~

Bucky spotted the mansion a far ways ahead, even staggering like a fool with a stump of an arm.

Not looking half as tortured as the man who awaited him on the porch, presiding over their grim parade from the respite of a begrudging rocker.

Strewn about him were the inelegant reminders of decay: oblong, twisted shutters, a flush pack of cards sorted to the wind.

A dead tree desperately hanging onto its roots, giving rise in the soil to a hundred leaks and fissures that showed evidence of destruction down to the very earth. 

"Would you mind if I had a drink of your water, sir?"

"Not at all, please." The man waved a hand laden with an embroidered handkerchief, and Bucky gratefully stepped forward, through the parted gates.

"Thank you." Even as he spoke, Bucky felt an odd sense of camaraderie flowing between them. Of all the soldiers treading the road, no one seemed to be exactly talkative.

"Beautiful, wasn't it? Once?" Bucky couldn't help a wave of sentimentality, for this was the kind of oak he'd known as a kid in Prospect Park. Trees so sturdy and elegant they brought to mind the intricacies of a sharp-eyed craftsman, rather than anything naturally wild.

"The tree I mean, sir?" Amending his statement belatedly, chased by a sheepish smile. Bucky not wishing to bring to mind all they'd lost, more than he already did with his one-armed fumbling at the spigot.

"Once it was.  _Very_ beautiful," the man spoke quickly, not meeting Bucky's eyes. He seemed almost in a trance. At the very least, a malaise that fed directly from the passage of so many unattended days. 

Bucky knew a thing or two about that, the counter-intuitive absurdity of silence after so much gunfire. Of peace amongst those still whole-heartedly at war.

"War claims a lot of victims," he said softly, "Man, and animals, and...God's own beauty."

He found himself before the tossed branches of the fallen tree, no longer holding any life. Again, a kinship rose in Bucky's chest, bolstered by his words. Words that seemed to be a fitting epitaph for what stood before them.

"Sir, would you mind if I sat here for a spell, rested a bit?" 

With a new conviction, the man answered, "Not at all."

"Thank you," and he couldn't help but sigh as he stooped.

The details of their final battle remained hazy at the corner of his mind, as if waiting to be uncovered, but Bucky knew it'd been a long way from there to here.

He knew it in his feet and his aching, lost arm. Knew it in a sense of cold he couldn't shake, though he could tell it was summer by the feel of the breeze. 

He knew it down deep, wrapped around any archaic hopes for the future. He'd been on the road so long, it was tough to say if he'd ever apprehended what was at the end of it.

Enjoying the smallest scrap of comfort, Bucky stretched and yawned. It was then that the man started to hum, just under the timbre of his breath.

" _I'll Be Seeing You_ ," Bucky whispered, "that was one of my friend's favorite songs."

"Was it, now?" the man asked gently, pausing slightly in recognition, before asking, "And uh, where is he?"

"He was killed," the words tumbled from Bucky with such ominous velocity that the man abandoned his humming altogether. "Stranded out over the Arctic when his plane crashed,' he clarified, finding the pain lessened just to speak it aloud, sympathetically, to another soul. 

It'd been so long since he'd talked, Bucky seemed to have forgotten how good it could be.

"I'm sorry," the man answered, and they surveyed each other with the same glimmering respect. 

With tears in his eyes, Bucky listened to the hum of such a sweet, sad song that he no longer believed in. He listened until it rose up around them, tuned to his own bitter hopes.

"Fresh fatigues, shiny brass, and a thousand rifles. Bugles and drums. Nothing but bugles and drums. Beat the Nazis in a month, we said, with America on the field. Beat the Nazis in a month."

Bucky paused, gulping down a sob.

"How wrong we were. I was so confident, standing there saying my goodbyes, so confident that I didn't let it linger, didn't say all I could. Felt so good to be finally getting in on the action. I was so eager. No tears _then_ , because I was so sure I'd be coming back just as I'd left. How wrong I was."

Bucky let it flow through him, the same recriminating self-anger and subsequent rush of regret.

The unsettling sensation of mounting change, and alarm, that the man had stood from his chair to comfort him, only to collapse weakly against a pillar. 

"Oh," he gasped out.

"Not feeling well?" Bucky asked, forgetting himself as he hurried to stand.

"No, no. I'm alright. It's the fever. But I'm on the mend now. It's left me a little weak, that's all," he tried to reassure Bucky, "a little weak is all."

Slowly, Bucky eased back down to where he could still keep a close eye, if the man did turn out to faint. 

After a moment of blossoming silence, he said, "Still they come," as if referring to snowflakes on a window screen. "Morning and night, night and morning, they walk down that road. The young ones and the old ones. How worn they look. How tired."

Bucky took stock of himself, knowing he'd needed a shower never received as little as six months past. The edges of time blurred, and he struggled to remember just what had happened to him after the fall. 

He'd lost the arm, then been rescued after a bout of cold so bleak it still felt lodged in his bones. And then the news they gave him, whether out of spite or horror, he couldn't recall.

Only learning that there was an end to Steve, and then the plunge into recurring darkness that seemed to mean they'd fixed him up, or tried.

"Are there hundreds of them or thousands of them?" The man continued to lean hard against the support, eyes flickering over the road with an inexplicable terror. 

Bucky saw his own setbacks in the stones of that road, cursed and rough in the dim fog, and felt equally afraid. 

"Probably closer to a million. Wouldn't you think that with so many, my-my friend might be amongst them?", he laughed softly, displaying no sign of the petty indignities, the whispers and scrape-ups the city dished out to them as people a little _off_. 

Curiously, despite the dangers of being queer, Bucky seemed to climb a little higher as human the more time he spent on Steve. Higher than the talk of those who claimed to know the nature of love, at least.

Lately, Bucky's very shadows were fleshed in with the understanding that love needs no nature, for it continues on, even in the face of mortal despair, and even severed by death.

After a moment's pause, the man leaned towards him and asked kindly, "Sergeant?"

"Yes, sir?"

"Would you do me a favor?" 

"Sure, if I can," Bucky replied, not wishing to prolong false hope.

"Would you hum that song, real loud? I mean _really_ loud. Drown me out."

The man seemed to be sifting through reserves for the words he needed to say.

"Loud, sir?" Bucky echoed, trying to prompt a return on such a strange request. Only after he spoke did Bucky notice the man's clouded expression.

"I'm so sick to death of hearing the sound of footsteps on the road. Please hum it loud, so I can hear music."

"Oh, you don't want me to-"

"Please, Sergeant!" Bucky acquiesced immediately, knowing this was a request from one party lost at sea to another.

"As you wish," he answered, and starting humming in time to the memory of Steve, dancing along to the camp radio.

The way his head cocked to the side in thought before picking Bucky up to rest on his booted toes. The sliding backdrop of Italy observed from behind his back, fingers interlocked, swaying along together.

_"I'll find you in the morning sun,_

_and when the night is new..."_

Rawer than the arm was the hole in him Steve's death created. The manner of it; how he'd been alone. His heroism, the bravery Bucky recognized from when it stood in front of him, soft-eyed, wanting and pure. 

It was funny, how sure Bucky'd been that if word like that ever came, he'd be gone soon, too. 

~~~

Chopping wood with one available hand was no easy task. Each time he sent splinters flying in all directions and provided much amusement he was sure to the travelers along the road, though none deigned to laugh. 

The man sat vigil with him on the porch, as usual.

Bucky knew more than a snatch now, knew a fair bit about who he was dealing with. A scientist who felt he'd served the wrong side. A man riddled with fear of the unknown, of what he'd made plausible in the world. 

These thoughts were no small task, either, and as diligently as possible Bucky left him to think them in peace.

~~~

"Colonel Phillips!"

Bucky looked up just as the two men noticed each other, and the man on the road turned to keep walking. 

"Colonel, it's me, Erskine!" Revived, the doctor rushed from the porch and across the battered lawn.

"We thought you'd been killed, that's what everyone said. They said you'd been shot in the head in Italy. I'm so glad you've come back, Colonel!"

Even as Erskine embraced him, the Colonel stumbled ahead.

"I'm so glad you're alright!," he continued, practically beating the man's chest to stir a response. "Couldn't you stop a minute, Colonel? Couldn't you stop a minute and talk?"

Rapidly Erskine's excitement was turning to bewilderment, and Bucky hobbled over to be closer to the conversation, grasping at a thought that seemed to be just out of reach. 

"I'm almost there, Doctor," the Colonel returned, gazing ahead at the unflagging fog covering the forthcoming road. His voice sounded gentle and far-off. "I'm almost there."

"Your wife will be so glad to see you, Colonel!"

"I don't have far to go..."

"So very, very glad!" 

Bucky found himself taking support from the rusted gate as he watched the scene unfold. He felt sure that whatever they were witnessing, his life was a part of it somehow.

Slowly, the Colonel took off his cap. 

"I won't need all this...all this weight," he stripped from his back the heavy camp pack and bedroll that were standard circulation.

"Oh, Colonel!" Erskine continued, oblivious, blinded by deprivation and hope.

"I'll leave it here," he continued, seeming content with the arrangement of never seeing his things again, as they would likely be scavenged by those farther up the road. "Gonna leave this here," he whispered, "gotta keep moving."

For the space of a second, he reclined into Erskine, eyes still fixed on the horizon. 

"I got to keep going, Doctor. Good-bye, now."

"Colonel? Colonel, will you give Susan my best? And tell her when you get settled to please come over? Would you do that for me? Though I expect she'll want to keep you to herself for some time."

The Colonel looked at Erskine fully, then, with a mixture of pity and wonderment. 

"I know if it was my husband, I'd hold him close, so close. I'd not let him leave again." Bucky spoke almost from memory, an echo of the words he'd rehearsed for his own homecoming that had seemed so inevitable, once.

Now he scarcely had arms to hold onto anything, much less the past.

"I'm sure," came the Colonel's reply, and Erskine watched him stumble down the road without further comment.

They stood lost for a moment, before Erskine ran a hand through his hair and continued brightly, "That was Colonel Phillips. They said he'd been killed in Italy. Shot through the head, that's what they said. Thank god they made a mistake."

Bucky bent to pick up the supplies that the Colonel left behind, if not out of respect then perhaps for his own benefit. Erskine stooped to grab the cap from where he'd let it fall. 

"Thank god..." he said, even as he started to turn the hat in his hands, an expression of intense fear grazing his face.

"What's wrong?" Bucky asked, sensing that he may already know the answer.

"Well, there's-there's blood on his cap. There's blood on the Colonel's cap."

After gingerly setting the cap to rest on a prong of the gate, Erskine stared out towards the terminus of the road for a long while. Bucky left him to it, knowing that he was embroiled in a reckoning both smaller and more infinite than words can express.

~~~

After Bucky finished chopping, or finished as well as he could, he sat staring at the passing soldiers, Erskine's lantern keeping vigil by his side.

"You've finished already?" Erskine called from the doorway, even though it had long since turned dark. 

"I have a knack for one-handedness. Been practicing all my life. Fact, I was right-handed from the moment I was born. Hardly needed the left for anything. I'm better off without it, really."

Erskine responded to the humor in his tone, inviting Bucky to sit on the steps with him as he mended by the soft light.

"That's a fine coat."

"Made it myself." Such a wistfulness graced Erskine's tone that Bucky assumed, his hands weren't used to wartime work. "Of course, it's not as nice as anything you'd get in a store. Industry has more skill than I, of course."

"My father used to worry, he'd say, 'You're going to end up a good-for-nothing factory worker, if you don't apply yourself.' To that I reply, it would've served me better had I been. My father...I can see the way he used to look at me, his face squinted up like a persimmon. He certainly took the shortest egress out of this war, and for that I resented him with half of me and longed for him with the other."

Bucky sympathized. If at the end of the road it happened that his mother lived, he doubted it would be enough to make up for the worry he'd caused. She'd always looked forward to him becoming a man. Bucky wondered fleetingly, but not for the first time, if he ever had. 

"My mother was so proud of me, the day I marched off to war. There was her baby, leaving to return a man. I might come back half of me...but I'll come back," Bucky's voice died down to a tremor, "I owe her that at least."

They fell into silence, humming along to the same lingering words, working over the same hurt.

"My friend, Steve, he used to sing this song to me. I wish you could've met him. He was a very kind man. A very brave man. I can remember nights when we'd sit on the fire escape, doing nothing but talking and laughing. Even the traffic would stop, for us."

"I bet it did," Erskine returned. "Steve is a good, strong name."

"It was as if time didn't matter, in our corner of Brooklyn. Then the Nazis started invading the Continent. Like locusts, they took everything from my family, their self-respect, their dignity, their history and meaning. I owe them for much: for the lives of my people."

Here Erskine laid a hand on his shoulder, but Bucky continued.

"For our land, our family still here in Europe, for the boys from our block that came here to fight. For everything that was. Including my friend's life. I owe them for much."

"I owe the same," Erskine answered.

"Then why don't you go away from here?"

"This place, this is all I have," the Doctor paused, then restarted, smiling like a faded photograph of a man once happy.

"Sergeant, what do you think will happen to all the Nazis now? Do you think they get to march home to their families? Laughing, and singing, and telling everyone about the scum they've killed? All the chambers, and all the gas piped through them?"

Erskine covered a face full of tears, unable to go on. 

"No, no, I don't think it's anything like that at all," Bucky answered, if only for the sheer comfort of deceiving himself that it was so. "If you let that kind of poison set on your mind, you'll die from it, Doctor."

Without seeming to hear him, Erskine continued. "I got a gun inside."

"A gun?" 

"It's an old shotgun. And I keep thinking about how someday, some moment, a Nazis is gonna have to take this road. And I'm going to take out that gun, and aim it at him. I'm going to aim it at him but first I'm going to tell him he can consider this the last shot of the Second Great War."

"It would be a bullet well in exchange for the grave my friend took. But I can't hear any more talk about butchery and bloodshed. There's hundreds and thousands of our kids that were killed and maimed. And then Mr. Roosevelt, dead. I don't want to hear about more-"

They both turned to see a horse and rider, stilled at the gate. Shrouded in black, it was hard to tell the exact nature of the man, let alone what side he'd belonged to. 

"Who's that?" Bucky asked, venturing forward. Erskine followed close by.

"Hello?," the man seemed to be asking, as if in confirmation, "I wonder if you could tell me if there's any water around here?"

"Yes, sir, there's some water right here from the spigot. I'm sure Erskine wouldn't mind if you had some, Lieutenant. You traveling far?" Even in the dark, it was possible to predict such an answer.

"Just up the road. But I've been on it a long time. You too?"

"Yes," Bucky answered, as if just remembering again, "yes, a long time. It seems to me, it seems to me that I know you. Did we meet somewhere?"

"That's possible."

"I don't know what, but I'm trying to remember..."

"What is it that you remember?" The man's curiosity encouraged Bucky, but still, it was harder than iron to remember details surrounding the fall...

He took his head from his hand like a bolt. "I got it! I was stranded in the mountains, in the cold, just had my arm torn off by the fall, and you came by with a patrol of Germans and you stopped in the snow, and you bent over to take care of me. You stopped the bleeding. Do you remember, Lieutenant?"

"Yes, I remember that," he said. With a just a touch of bitterness, that made Bucky wonder.

"Of course you do! I'd like for you to meet Doctor Erskine, who's the owner of the place..." Bucky turned just in time to see the barrel of Erskine's shotgun fixed on the Lieutenant's head.

"Doctor!" Bucky hissed, shocked and shaking. 

"You best pay heed to the Sergeant's gratitude, because it's the last gift you'll ever receive," Erskine yelled, "the last one on Earth, this I promise you." His wild eyes were a cover for something so hurt, so real and human that Bucky doubted the significance of another shot in such a war.

"Doctor, would you give me the gun?" Even as Erskine cocked and aimed, the man stayed stock-still, staring straight ahead from under the brim of a wide, concealing hat. 

"This your pleasure, Doctor?" he asked calmly.

"And duty. A little of both, perhaps."

"Then you'd best get on with it." Erskine was past the point of losing his nerve, with such a show of bravado to match. 

"Doctor, the Lieutenant here tried to save my life!" Bucky had no idea why it came out like it did. _Tried_.

"You've thanked him, Sergeant," Erskine returned. "Now if you'll be good enough to step aside so I can thank him for a few other services rendered us."

Bucky attempted to knock the shotgun from Erskine's hand, but only served to stumble over himself, unexpectedly bereft of an arm and all the heft that it lent. The shot rang out, shaking Bucky's teeth to the core, but still the man sat on his horse, resolute and unhurt.

As he recovered his footing, Bucky heard the amazed words of Erskine, over and over- "I couldn't have missed you."

Choked by realization and drowning in smoke, Bucky snatched the gun from Erskine's hand, throwing it to the ground. 

"It doesn't make any difference whether you did or didn't miss me."

Bucky finally found the tendril he'd been grasping for, and for a moment he _remembered_.

"Wait a minute, now it's coming. Now I remember, I remember they got you that day, Lieutenant. You were kneeling down, tending me, when a shell exploded near us, and this hot steel sprayed all over the place. I remember you standing up and clawing at your eyes and screaming, 'I'm blind! I'm blind!' I remember thinking you'd been killed. I remember thinking you were dead!"

"That doesn't make any difference now either," the man explained, and Bucky stood back in horror. "That water, from the spigot?" 

"Certainly, Lieutenant," Bucky answered, moving to get the man his drink, still in a slow shock. Erskine hung behind him, mouth ajar, staring at the shadowed figured, but mostly just the shadowed figure's face.

Bucky held out a cup of water to the man, only then realizing that he was, or must be, blind. Gently, he tapped the man's hand with the ceramic, and he dutifully took it. After he'd drained his fill, Bucky took back the cup.

Swiftly, and without perusing too thoroughly the implications it would have in his own life, Bucky lifted his lantern to the man's face. 

What Bucky saw made him take an involuntary step back into Erskine, who's hand was clamped firmly over his mouth. The Lieutenant was in fact blind; the evidence lay in a face maimed beyond recognition. 

After a moment, the Lieutenant, clear as day, said, "I wish you the best, Doctor. I do wish you the best." Erskine nodded, as well as he could.

"And you, sir." Bucky shakily assented.

As he steered through the gate, the man called back to them softly, "And this, too, shall pass. This, too, shall pass. Wait and see. Wait and see..."

Disappearing into the fog, thicker and darker with night, the man left them to stare at each other, dazed, confronting a growing nightmare that threatened to swallow sanity.

Bucky was never gladder for a companion, through dawn and into grey morning.

~~~

"Morning, Sergeant," Erskine greeted him. 

"Morning, Doctor. Could you come out to the gate with me, for a minute?" Bucky had readied his things as steadily as possible earlier on, knowing it would be the last sun break to ever shine over his world.

For more than a moment, he hoped that Steve would be waiting. Steve with such fire and fury, who'd braid him up and down for taking so long to understand.

Erskine appeared at the door, seemingly distraught. "You're leaving?"

"Yes, sir, I'm leaving. I've got to say goodbye and thank you for letting me stay. It's time to get back on the road...to wherever the road leads."

Bucky shrugged indecisively, not wishing to break the news, and Erskine jumped on it immediately.

"Well, I can tell you where that road leads. It leads past fifty miles of places like this, burned-out mansions and burned-out roads and-"

"-you see, Doctor, I was up most of the night last night, and I was thinking...I was thinking about a lot of things. I was thinking of that blind Lieutenant, and your old friend, the Colonel. Remember Colonel Phillips, with the blood on his cap?" Bucky gestured to the slat on the gate where it still hung, wafting in the breeze.

"And sometime during the night, once you fell asleep," Bucky continued, "they stopped coming. And it got quiet on the road there, it got so quiet. And in that quiet, just before dawn, it came to me..."

"What did?" Erskine asked.

Bucky turned to face him, and they shared a look of mutual bereavement.

"I don't know just how to explain it, but it's got to do with that road down there and the men moving along it. There were Axis soldiers too, a lot of them Italian, some of our kids helping them, but all of them moving down the road together. Just as if..." Bucky'd lost what he was trying to say, it'd flitted away from him again in a flight of fancy. 

"Just as if?" Erskine prompted, seeming to share the sentiment that something was wrong, but there was no telling what.

"I don't know, Doc," Bucky opined, stretching his thoughts, trying to accomodate what he'd seemed to discover with the new day. "Well...there's something down at the end of that road, and I've got to find out what it is. So I'll just take my leave, here, and I wish you well. I most certainly wish you well."

Bucky started to put on his hat, another fumbling gesture. Some part of him felt that it wouldn't be for much longer, this depravation. 

"Sergeant, Sergeant!" Erskine stopped him, suddenly springing into action. "I'd be alone. Please don't go. Stay here." 

He implored him so gently, Bucky felt a rising pity and shame that they would part in this world so soon.

"No, Doctor. There's nothing here that could ever belong to me, nothing at all." He was thinking of Steve, the skinny curve of him, the brute force of him, in all his colors and moods. A longing so profound, it seemed to whisper in his ear, _not much further now_.

"What do you think you'll find at the end of that road?" Erskine challenged him. "A future? A Jewish state, perhaps? A new generation born out of the ashes?"

Bucky continued to shake his head, even as Erskine trailed off. 

"Please?" he begged at last, and Bucky could only smile. He'd heard a familiar tune, far-off as the Colonel's eyes, and he harkened to it, letting it flow over him. 

As it grew closer, Erskine stilled to listen, too. 

What came around the bend wasn't a man of any small imagining. Relief blew through Bucky like the cold-veins of adrenaline, leaving nothing but peace in its path. 

"Stevie! I'm here!" They appraised each other, Bucky no longer even feeling the loss of his arm.

Emboldened by wholeness and headiness in equal measure, he chased himself awkwardly down the stairs and into Steve's arms. 

"Your lips," Bucky choked out, "your lips are so blue." He placed his fingers over Steve's lips to warm them, savoring how that hadn't been snatched from them yet. "I lost an arm in the fall, was real sick for a while, but now that you're here, now that you're here we can go home. We can go back to Brooklyn, Stevie."

Bucky's eyes clouded anew with the very thought. _We're going home, we're going home._ Somehow though, it didn't seem that his destination was Brooklyn anymore.

"That was home, Buck," Steve stared down at him sadly, even as they still clung together, bodies tight. "It isn't any longer."

"We can rebuild it all. You can go to art school on the G.I. and we can get an apartment near the docks and we'll have sugar and oranges and it'll be warm in the winter and you won't ever get sick again..." 

Further away, Erskine was observing with a growing sadness. Steve too seemed to be holding back. 

"What's the matter, Stevie?"

"Doctor?" Steve addressed Erskine, and they shared a fond look.

"Do you know him?" Bucky asked, and Steve nodded his assent.

"Doctor. You know, right?" 

"I think I do, I'm not sure, but I think I do." Whatever Bucky'd been working towards, it didn't amount to much. Whatever he'd had to tell him no longer mattered.

_They were going home._

Steve and Erskine continued to speak to themselves, before the Doctor turned to Bucky and said, "No doubt I'll be seeing you again in time. At the end of that road. No doubt I'll be seeing both of you again."

Bucky watched him go, turning back to Steve. 

"What's happened?" he asked softly, after what seemed like a long enough kiss hello, but what might've also been a few seconds.

Steve took his face in hand, so gentle a touch it tickled, and stared him closely in the eyes. Bucky felt such a warmth he nearly cried out loud.

"You know life, Buck, it's kind of like a song. You play it right to the end, and when the notes are finished, and they die out, there's only silence. And that's when you move on."

Bucky couldn't help but giggle. "Steve?" he asked deliriously, "are we-are we dead?"

"Yes, Buck, like all those men on the road. Mine came in the Arctic sheathed in ice and yours came here in a laboratory."

"No, Steve, no, we're alive. And we have to go back to Brooklyn, cause if we don't it means we've given up everything!"

"But there's nothing to give up, nothing at all-"

"Stevie, don't leave me," where Bucky had briefly pulled away from him before, he was clinging harder than ever now.

"I'm not leaving you, baby. I'll wait for you," he held out his hands in welcome, "I'll meet you at the end of the road, it's not far at all."

"Steve, Stevie..."

"I'll wait for you, Bucky, I'll wait for you." Their hands brushed and once again he watched the world and life of a man recede from view along the dusty road. 

"Steve, come back to me!" he sobbed, collapsing on the gravel. As he cried, he felt a hand lift his shoulder.

"You're staying behind, my man?", He stooped to help Bucky up. "Maybe that's not so wise," Roosevelt spoke, just so softly.

The braces on his legs were no hindrance, no hindrance at all, the same as Bucky's arm hadn't been since...

It came back to him, falling into place like a drape over the pain of all the yesterday's and tomorrow's he'd be spared. 

"I'm afraid," he whispered simply.

"Of course you are," Franklin supplied, "and I am too. 'Of all the wonders that I yet have heard, it seems to me most strange that men should fear, seeing that death, a necessary end, will come, when it will come.' That's from Shakespeare. Julius Caesar."

They smiled into each other's eyes, mirthful with the words of such a timely man, one who'd not be caught struggling on the roadside.

"You see, I'm dead, too. I guess you might say, I'm the last casualty of the Second Great War."

"No," Bucky said, not wanting it to be so. 

"And I'm the last man on this road."

"No," Bucky said again, without much conviction behind it. In the moment before he turned around to call Steve's name, Bucky felt the tears on his face beginning to dry.

As he ran, he reached out for Steve in the fog, who appeared to him with open arms. They embraced with a kiss and continued, hand in hand, into the fray.

~~~

Incident on a dirt road. The year, 1945. 

Existent proof of man's struggle between the known and the unknown.

A mystery leading us to the end of the road...in _The Twilight Zone_. 


End file.
